Glasser, Abraham (1914-1976)

An American lawyer, government servant and teacher of law, who was accused of being an agent of the Soviet NKVD intelligence in 1937 and 1938.

Glasser was born on December 14, 1914 in New Brunswick, New Jersey to a family of descendants from Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire. He attended public schools in New Brunswick, graduating from high school in 1930, and then studied at Rutgers University, receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1933. From 1933 to December 1935, he attended graduate school at Princeton University, receiving Master of Arts and Political Science degrees in June 1935. At the end of December 1935, Glasser received an offer from the U.S. government to come to Washington, where he got a job as a special attorney assigned to research at the Department of Justice. As he would explain years later, his legal education “was of the old-fashioned type”: he “read law by himself at the office of the Attorney General of the United States.” Glasser’s major assignment was a research project entitled “The Use of Military Force by the Federal Government in Domestic Disturbances.” A collection of documents and background materials which he assembled for the project, along with his study drafts and working papers, later became part of the historic investigative files of the Justice Department and is commonly known as the “Glasser File.” ¹ In early 1939, Glasser was admitted to the bar in the District of Columbia “on the strength of having read law” while on the job. After that, he was assigned to regular attorney’s work at the Antitrust Division. ²

On June 17, 1941, Glasser was suspended from his job on the basis of reports from the FBI on its investigation into the case known as the case of “Armand Lavis Feldman.” This name was an alias of one Iosif (Joseph) Vulfovich Volodarsky, who was an operative of the Soviet OGPU/NKVD foreign intelligence (INO) in the United States from 1933 to 1938. On April 25, 1938, Volodarsky suddenly disappeared from the sight of the Soviets and moved to Canada, taking some sensitive files with him. In November 1940, he was arrested and interned by Canadian authorities. Having refused to return to the United States, he provided limited information to the FBI, including identification of Abraham Glasser as a source at the U.S. Department of Justice with the cover name “Maurice,” whom he had met with “during the latter part of 1937 and the early part of 1938.” ³

Since Feldman/Volodarsky refused to return to the United States to testify against Glasser, the FBI resolved, at the very least, to force his discharge from government service. In June 1941, the Department of Justice launched an investigation of Glasser on charges of Communism and espionage. Glasser denied all the charges and insisted that he had never been a member of the CPUSA. The investigation found that his contacts with Feldman, “if they existed, were not inspired by motives of disloyalty, nor by the desire knowingly to misuse his official position to the advantage of an ill-intentioned outsider.” On October 24, 1941, the Justice Department absolved Glasser of specific charges of Communism and espionage, but determined that he had been negligent in the manner in which he treated contents of official files of the department. The Justice Department required his resignation, however without prejudice, and permitted him to accept a position with the Office of Price Administration (OPA).

Glasser resigned on October 31, 1941 and transferred the next day to the OPA’s Enforcement Litigation Division, where he “handled the preparatory work and later the court work on major constitutional test litigation for the OPA.” In 1944, however, the Department of Justice denied the OPA’s request to have Glasser designated as Special Assistant to the Attorney General for purposes of OPA litigation. A year later, he was denied re-employment with the Department of Justice. Glasser resigned from the OPA on July 1, 1947 and was hired by Rutgers University as a lecturer in law. He was soon promoted to assistant professor and later, to associate professor. ⁴

In the early 1950s, Glasser was called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), following the appearance of a series of newspaper stories which accused him – anonymously – of espionage. The articles were based on a 1951 congressional report, The Shameful Years, which mentioned an unnamed employee of the Department of Justice who was forced to resign, then worked at the OPA, and was described as a major Soviet spy. ⁵ In March 1953, Glasser appeared before HUAC, denied the charges and took the Fifth Amendment.

The following month, his case was referred to the Faculty Committee of Review of the Law School of Rutgers University, “for hearing, consideration, and recommendation to the Board of Trustees.” In August, the Committee resolved that Glasser had violated the policy of the Board of Trustees in regard to the use of the Fifth Amendment – forcing Glasser to submit his resignation in September 1953. In November 1955, the Association of American Law Schools Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure disapproved of the Rutgers decision and recommended that the university give Glasser another hearing, which was refused in January 1956. The university was censured by the American Association of University Professors in April 1956 and by the American Association of Law Schools in May 1957. Nonetheless, Rutgers refused to reopen Glasser’s case. ⁶

Glasser was not a member of the New Jersey bar and, therefore, could not practice law in that state. Neither could he find another teaching position in a law school, his reputation as a brilliant professor of law notwithstanding. Eventually, he found part-time work doing research for other lawyers ⁷ until he retired and moved to Edgartown, Massachusetts, where he died in December, 1976 at the age of 61. ⁸

Until recently, the dramatic story of Abraham Glasser was based on the word of one man, who was a defector from the Soviet intelligence ranks – weighed against the denial of another man, an American professional whose career and life were ruined by the defector’s accusations. The recently released notes on KGB intelligence files taken from early 1994 to early 1995 by Alexander Vassiliev, a former KGB intelligence officer and journalist, provide a window of opportunity to resolve that half-century-old dilemma. In 1952, when asked during the HUAC hearings about his Communist Party membership at the time he entered government employment in 1935, Glasser answered that he was not “a member of the Communist Party, provided that the term ‘membership in the Communist Party’ is understood to mean actual, official, card-carrying, organizationally connected and integrated party membership.” ⁹

Vassiliev’s notes confirm the veracity of Glasser’s answer. According to his excerpted notes on a letter sent from New York to Moscow Center on March 3, 1937, Glasser, who by that time was assigned the pseudonym “Maurice” (“Moris”), had a friend who was a Princeton classmate and a Communist. That friend “involved him in assistance to the Communist movement.” Having contacted the party organizer in Washington, D.C., the Soviets learned that “Maurice” “had not officially joined the [Communist] cell,” but “started procuring documents from his department.” ¹⁰ Most probably, Glasser was involved in CPUSA “informational work.” According to CPUSA files, American Communists were gathering information on a wide range of domestic and foreign policy problems, which the party used both for domestic consumption (including drafting social legislation, locating stoolpigeons in its ranks, campaigning against the growing Nazi, fascist and Japanese threats, etc.) and for informing the Comintern. According to Comintern files, the topic of Glasser’s research at the Department of Justice, “The Use of Military Force by the Federal Government in Domestic Disturbances,” had been the subject of early interest at the Moscow Headquarters of the Comintern. ¹¹ This explains CPUSA interest in obtaining spill offs from Glasser’s research.

The March 3, 1937 letter mentioned above, described the Soviets’ procedure for approaching Glasser. The operatives instructed their trusted agent, “Sound” – the American Communist Jacob Golos – to go to Washington, D.C. and make an agreement with the local party organizer to switch Glasser to another contact, who “allegedly would be a worker of the local compatriot organization.” “Compatriot” was a cover name for the local Communist party and/or its members. The party organizer then talked to Glasser, who agreed to the switch. The next sentence is unequivocal about what Glasser agreed to: “Changing the person, but not the line.” That is, Glasser was to be under the impression that he would be continuing to assist the American Communist Party, but through another contact. ¹²

The writer of the letter continued that “to pursue this line with M.[aurice] till the very end required having a person about whom M. would have no suspicion (with the knowledge of the language, local realities, etc.);” that is, “Maurice” was not to suspect that he was dealing with a foreign national. “On this score, unfortunately, there was no other candidate but Brit,” – the letter went on. “Brit” was the cover name of Joseph Volodarsky, who had been using variations on the names Lavis and Feldman since 1935 and 1936. The operative ended his account with a telling description of “Brit”: “Having become American enough to pass for an American, he simultaneously lost his command of Russian. Dialectics.” The approach worked, as follows from a comment by an operative: “M. is happy that he is not a spy but is working for an improvement of America.” ¹³

Glasser remained under the delusion that he was dealing with an American until his contact with “Brit” came to an end with the latter’s disappearance in late April of 1938. Contact with “Maurice” ceased, and the Soviets considered him in cold storage. In early August 1939, thinking over the chances of resuming contact with “Maurice,” Moscow operatives instructed their New York resident, Gajk Ovakimyan, on “the need to assign a local person for contact with Maurice and not to contact him directly.” ¹⁴ The contact with Glasser was not resumed in 1939 or in 1940. In early 1941, a plan using a weathered “illegal” of Austrian descent failed when this agent’s boat was torpedoed while crossing the Atlantic en route to America.

More than six decades later, Vassiliev’s notes support the conclusion that was reached in 1941 by the Department of Justice investigation: “Glasser in all likelihood did not know the true identity of the informant — nor the nature of his activities, and the true purpose for which he might wish the information allegedly sought from Mr. Glasser.” ¹⁵